The Most Cosmopolitan Of Chinese Communities

Eric Ellis, Hong Kong

08/10/1995

IF IT weren't for the empty polystyrene noodle lunchboxes, it could have been a mining site in deepest darkest Pilbara.

Fine dust chokes the throat and clogs the nostrils, fleets of giant trucks and earth-movers hurtle past, engineers in hard hats and shortsleeves speak in superlatives - biggest, longest, widest, most. But this is not the Pilbara; it's Hong Kong's $A25 billion new airport rising controversially on a flattened island in the New Territories.

The discarded noodle boxes bear witness to the emergence of Asia's newest wave of overseas Chinese economic migrants seeking their El Dorado, just as their forebears have done for centuries elsewhere in Asia, and the gum shan, or golden mountains of the West. Mainland Chinese are always trying to get into Hong Kong, mostly illegally. Police road blocks checking identity papers are a common site in the colony, at any place near an exposed beach or forested area.

The Royal Hong Kong Police report it apprehends a daily average of 80 mainlanders, going through the routine ritual of handing them back to communist authorities at the border in an Asian version of the the US-Mexican frontier with the "wetback" phenomenon.

Hong Kong's immigration authorities report that for every illegal arrival from the mainland in the colony, another two come legally, often workers who end up on building sites like the new airport, earning 10 times the salaries they might back home.

One of the world's great emigrant communities, Hong Kong has always been a magnet for Chinese, from China as well as elsewhere in the world. Its ethnically diverse Chinese community is a big reason why it thrives as a financial centre. Its Chiu Chou networks give it tentacles to Thailand's predominantly Chiu Chou Chinese community in a way that Hokkien Penang in Malaysia never can.

Similarly, the Shanghainese elite, which defined corporate life here from 1949 until the early 1980s, spear into Taiwan and Shanghai in ways the Cantonese of, say, Sydney or San Francisco never can.

But Hong Kong is the place they all come together to do deals. And its apprehensive 6 million people, pondering the future, hope China recognises that as well.

Hong Kong's often crass Canto-culture defines modern Chinese behaviour, particularly for its youth, across the world and Hong Kong leads the world's other Chinese communities in trends, particularly in business.

As a Chinese community, it cares far less than say the Chinese of Penang or Bangkok about where, or what clan, the person sitting opposite at the boardroom table came from than if that person can do the deal.

Thus, it is the most cosmopolitan of Chinese communities, with large sub-groups of Chiu Chou from the borders of Guangdong-Fujian province, Hokkien from Fujian, Shanghainese and others from Ningpo or Zhejiang province, Hakkas from everywhere and, since the 1997 treaty was signed sealing the handover from Britain to China, apprentice capitalists from the communist mainland.

And while clans and village ties have been a feature of Hong Kong business life, as anywhere, its pragmatic Chinese were quicker than elsewhere in not having cultural problems doing business with each other, and with the 300,000 non-Chinese community of North Americans, Australians, Britons, Europeans and other Asians.

Indeed, the non-Cantonese communities occupy much of the high ground of Corporate Hong Kong.

In a recent poll, Hongkongers voted as its most creative person not an artist, a calligrapher, a musician nor even a fellow Cantonese, but businessman Li Ka-shing, a Chiu Chou native who controls the Cheung Kong-Hutchison conglomerate which makes up around 10-12 per cent of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange capitalisation.

Li's traditional rival for ethnic Chinese business supremacy is the Wharf Group, founded by the late Shanghainese-Ningbonese tycoon Sir Yue-kong Pao and run today by his US-educated Shanghainese son-in-law, Peter Woo.

The TVB and Shaw Brothers entertainment giant is Shanghai region in origin, having made great strides among the hua qiao of Singapore and Malaysia in the 1950s and 60s.

Many of Hong Kong textile firms were begun by Shanghainese emigrants, who arrived after the 1949 Communist revolution, when their businesses were seized by Mao Zedong.

The two biggest Chinese newspapers are owned, respectively by a Chiu Chou family and a Burmese-Chinese of Singaporean and ultimately Hokkien origins - the Ma family's Oriental Daily and Sally Aw Sian's Sing Tao group, which prints editions in nine Western Chinatowns.

Mr Ma Ching-kwan and Miss Aw are both Australian passport-holders. The main English-language newspaper is owned by Malaysian-Chinese tycoon Mr Robert Kuok, who is of Fujian origin.

It is no coincidence that the four original Special Economic Zones set up in mainland China in Deng Xiaoping's first flush of economic reform in the early 1980s were in Shenzhen and Zhuhai in the Cantonese Pearl River delta, the ancestral centre of the Chiu Chou Shantou (also known as Swatow) and the thriving southern Fujian port of Xiamen (Amoy), all traditionally jumping off points for the world's 50 million overseas Chinese.

Today, their influence is evident by the Chiu Chou-owned Bangkok Bank, South-East Asia's biggest, which opened its first China branch in Shantou, and the Oversea Chinese Banking Corporation and United Overseas Bank in Xiamen, offices which report first to Hong Kong and then to Bangkok and Singapore.